# 17 The Deeds, Unbound project
Thomas Renew was clearly gratified to receive a good price for his land. He sold a large plat in northern Pickens County in 1843. It featured a grist mill and some sort of small farmhouse and 4 outbuildings. He was so pleased by this sale, that he noted at the bottom of the recorded transcription, that not only would he include Josiah, an enslaved carpenter who knew his way about the mill, but he would throw in for no charge, Josiah’s elderly mother, Anna.
What happened to Josiah and Anna?
We cannot be sure what happened to Josiah and Anna, but we have much to learn from this banal documentation of an otherwise unremarkable transaction. For Anna and Josiah were family and this record of their names, their relationship, and their skills has no parallel elsewhere in the historical record. As enslaved people, they would not have appeared in a census. And if they showed up in a slave schedule or tax records of any sort, of the pre-Emancipation age, they wouldn’t have been given names or specific identities of any sort.
Their appearance in a land deeds entry may seem like a small toss-away sentence amidst long paragraphs of legal mumbo-jumbo about property lines, but in its cruel clarity, it gives us a precious glimpse into the fact that they were able to sustain their relationship for at least a bit longer after their enslaver moved away. Josiah and Anna are imagined subjects here, but their kind of tale is exactly what has been lost and can be found through our intervention.
These records of families, of individuals, deserve preservation. These are records of human lives –men, women, and even babies--hidden away in real estate documents. In its current form, the archive perpetuates the inhuman categories of Antebellum enslavers. We propose to recover these records in order to recover and recognize these people. The deeds that bound them, can be undone by our actions today.
(These paragraphs you just read were lifted from a chunk of a grant proposal written in collaboration with Brent Morris, Chris Vinson, and Jessica Serrao)
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With a crackerjack team of colleagues at Clemson (J. Brent Morris, Christopher Vinson & Jessica Serrao), I am helping digitize, transcribe, and search Deed records for Pickens County, SC from the 18th and 19th century - and let’s be clear: Land doesn’t interest us.
We are seeking men, women and babies. For in what should be simple real estate transfers, are transactions that are painfully, horrifyingly real in other terms. Since humans were property, often they were attached to or entwined with land sales of that era. These records often list the name or even age and occupation of some of the individuals. For people who were the victims of archival annihilation in other ways (such as being ignored by early census documents) - these deed records provide a precious resource to discover and see or at least glimpse, the individuals who had so much at stake in these transactions. Not financial stakes, but the life and death stakes of being turned over to different enslavers who could do with them what they would.
Our Deeds, Unbound project is not unprecedented! Several other states, most particularly The “People , Not Property” project in North Carolina have led the way in such searching and we are looking to these initiatives for guidance and advice. But every state offers its own complications. And every county delivers new mysteries.
This is an image of a typical slave deed - this one is from North Carolina and you can read about it here:https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/people-not-property-statewide-database-of-slave-https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/people-not-property-statewide-database-of-slave-deeds-in-north-carolina
As for South Carolina, with its absolutely enormous population of enslaved people, the need for documentation is especially high and the challenges are complex (The Civil War took a toll on a lot of these records). We are starting with Pickens County and plan to move along, grant by grant, and county by county - to unbind these deeds, as it were and bring these families, these names, to light. We shall be working our way through the upstate counties and eventually aim to cover the populous counties of the low country - in which we expect to find thousands upon thousands of names.
I’ll spare you the details of the process right now…..but we are honing our systems and with the help of a graduate student, we are well underway. Eventually we shall be constructintg a website to share our findings and we shall connect to national organizations for corss searching and referenceing , eventually! I’ll be chronicling some of the discoveries we make along the way over the net few months.Watch this space.
*Here’s a cool site explaining how to read a property deed
*Clemson University did a nice write up about our project here
To learn more about The Runaway Chronicles and what to expect in future installments, check out my preview here. Installments will be posted each week on Mondays
To Cite:
Ashton, Susanna. "#17 The Deeds, Unbound Project." The Runaway Chronicles. Squarespace. 09/212/2024. https://susannaashton.squarespace.com/config/pages/65c93bd35c81e32bb1a08098/content